Mwynwen - the wrap up.
By Diana the Valkyrie
I dived out of Fluff's window, and zoomed upwards, heading for the Yard.
With Gretchen apparently unconscious and Min tossed out of the window, Harry
and I (wearing my patriotic Union Jack Duchess outfit) had flattened the bad
guys. The good guys always win, right? So, I untied the suit, and helped him
sit up on the bed. "Thank god, thank god" he babbled, "but who are you?" "I'm
the Duchess, we're spycatchers" I replied, and let him get a glimpse of my
library ticket. "We've been hoping to catch those two, they're evil, pure
evil. You wouldn't believe what Gretchen does with a pair of scissors." "Yes I
would", he said. "Oh thank you, thank you." "So will you be willing to appear
in court as a witness when we put them on trial?" "On trial? Yes indeed."
Harry leaned on the doorway, he was tossing a coin and catching it. P-ting.
P-ting "I say, old chap. What was it they was after?" P-ting. P-ting. "They
wanted information from me." "Yes indeed. Nasty ladies, don't you know? What
were they after?" "They wanted to know about the International Telecom
accounts." "And Gretchen was threatening to, you know?" Harry made a gesture
with two fingers snipping, at around crotch level. The suit nodded. "Uh huh.
And I think she would have, you know?" Harry grinned. "Oh she would, she
would. I hear she keeps them pickled in alcohol. I hear she has quite a
collection." P-ting. P-ting.
"Well, you're safe now, honey." I flexed my small biceps. "That bitch Gretchen
is no match for The Duchess." Harry continued. "So, this is valuable
information she was after, I guess?" "Oh yes," confirmed the suit. "With that
they could have manipulated our share price." "How?" I led him by the hand to
the dining room table, and got him to explain.
"For several years now, we've been investing in fibre optic cables, running in
the same trunking that the old copper wires run. The problem is, this costs a
lot of money to install, and it'll be a long time before we get any revenue
out of it. Meanwhile, it's like a huge cost against our revenues, and a few
years ago, it looked like we would be running at a loss for a long time. So I
came up with a couple of great ideas!"
"Go on", I encouraged.
"Well, first off, these fibre cables will last for 25 years. So, we won't take
the full cost of installing them, we'll just take 1/25 of the cost each year,
for 25 years." "Fair enough", I said. "Sounds reasonable to me." "It does,
doesn't it? And it's within accepted accounting rules" he said proudly. "So
what else?" "The trouble is, we weren't getting enough people using them, so
we weren't getting enough revenue to cover even the 1/25 of costs. So then I
set up another company, and we sold the loss-making cable to the other
company, and leased back the use of it at a much lower rate. So the other
company was making the losses, not us." "But surely the losses of the other
company would get added to your company results?" "No, that's the beauty of
it. We registered the company in a country that allows you to own 97% of
another company, and you still don't have to add their results in with yours!"
Wow. What a cunning scheme. I wondered which country would be so dumb as to
have accounting rules like that, but it didn't really matter; now that we know
how the scam worked, we had all we needed. Harry pulled out his mobile phone
and said into it "Open channel D". At that point, the dining room door was
splintered off its hinges as Sharon heard her entrance cue and smashed her way
in like a tank. Harry yelled "For King and country" and stepped into her path.
She went through him like a hot knife through butter, and slammed into me.
Sharon and I rolled around hurling curses and punches at each other, and
ripping off each other's clothes in a kind of superheroine's catfight, and
while this major distraction was entertaining our audience, Min came up behind
him, popped a paper bag over his head, wrapped her arms round him and flew him
through the door, across the bedroom, out the open window and up into the sky.
"Whew" I said. "OK, you can let me up now." "Mmm?" said Sharon. "Sharon, you
can let me get ... oh. Oh. Sharon, this isn't the time... or the place. Oh.
Oh. No. Stop it."
Oh, all right then.
By the time the Witch got back from airlifting the suit back to the Telecom
tower and dumping him back in his office, both Harry and I were worn out by
Sharon's energetic lovemaking. He'd caught it worse than me, of course; I
could get Sharon to ease up on me so that I could give him a good firm
fluffing, so he was taking the brunt of it. But that was OK, that's what love
is all about, give and take. He gave, she took. Then they swapped round; she
took, he gave.
"Oh, I see you started without me," said the Witch. Harry took her hand in
his. "Did you get what you needed, Min?" "I'll say. Now we know what we're
looking for, we can get a court order and seize the paperwork, dump the
computer data and then it's just a matter of a team of counter-accountants to
counter the accounting that hides the true and fair situation. Fluff, you
looked great as The Duchess, I think the Union Jack suits you much better than
that silly Llama costume." "You think so? I thought the wired bust gives me a
bit of, you know? Extra whatnot? Yes, I think I prefer it too." I replied.
"Well, time to wrap this one up", said Min, grabbing a couple of French bread
sticks for inflight refuelling. "I'll leave the paper with you folks, could
you send it round to Scotland Yard in a cab or something?" "Sure," I said.
Part 2
I dived out of Fluff's window, and zoomed upwards, heading for the Yard. I
landed on the roof, and did the fire-door trick there. It's surprising how
many buildings you can get into that way. I made my way to Inspector Cameron's
office, and knocked one the door. Sure enough, he was there as usual, working
on the weekend. "Oh, Donald, you ought to get some time off" "Oh, hi Min. I
can't there's so much to do, so little time to do it in. When will you be
getting started on the Telecom case?" I grinned. I sat on his computer
monitor; with the gravy down to quarter size, it could take my weight. I
looked down at him and smiled. "All done and dusted, Chief". "Don't call me
... what? What?"
I explained the deal to him. "But, but. This is a billion pound fraud! I was
looking for a bit of a fiddle on the side, you've found that the whole company
is a fake!" I nodded. "But you want to move fast, Chief. When Mr Suit realises
what he's let slip, the old shredders are going to be working red hot."
"You're right! There isn't a moment to lose."
We rushed down a few floors, and grabbed an in-house lawyer. Outside, we
hailed a cab and drove down to the Temple, while Cameron lined up a bunch of
boys from the Uniform Branch, and a couple of lorryloads of computer gear. I
swore an affidavit to the effect that a serious fraud was taking place and we
needed to do a raid right now, to gather the evidence before it got destroyed,
and we got our warrant. Then we met the boys in blue, plus the geeks with the
computer gear, outside Telecom Tower. Cameron marched up to the vestibule, and
presented the warrant to a startled receptionist. "This is a raid" he said
"Don't nobody move" I added, under my breath.
We fanned out through the building. On a raid like this, you don't aim to
analyse the evidence, you just aim to grab it, bag it and blag it. The
instruction is, if it looks like a computer, seal it in an evidence bag and
put it in the lorry. If it turns out you seized a toaster or a coffee maker,
no big deal, we just give them back. If you fail to seize some important
backup system, you might have missed some crucial evidence.
First, we spread out and dropped a uniform off on each floor. The idea is, you
shut down all the computers, then nothing can be deleted. The uniform makes
sure that there isn't some bright spark decides to do a mass erase. Then the
geek squad deals with the boxes, one floor at a time. But there was one key
player we needed to secure; Cameron and I headed for the 97th floor and the
office of the Director of Finance.
The door was shut. Cameron hurled himself across the corridor and smashed the
door down with his shoulder. At least, that was the idea. The actuality was
that the door was solid oak, and Cameron bounced off the door, staggered back
and started making a face like someone with a broken arm. "Here's let me try",
I said. I turned the knob and pushed. The door opened. Sometimes the easy way
works.
Inside, the Director of Finance had that deer-in-the-headlights look. I wasn't
sure how much he'd worked out by now - maybe he thought it was Gretchen coming
back for her trophy, or maybe he'd realised he was facing 25 years of
porridge, damned by his own mouth. Either way, he wasn't going to take it, and
he rushed for the exit. Except Cameron was standing in the doorway. So he went
for the other exit.
The glass that they use in these towers is supposed to be very strong. It's
supposed to be able to take a body bouncing off it. I guess no-one ever tested
it to see what would happen if a 230 pound accountant picked up his chair and
used it as a battering ram. The glass shattered, and he followed the chair out
of the window. I didn't think twice, I just flew across the room, dived out
the window, and as soon as I was outside, I dived straight down. I caught up
with him round about the 50th floor, got him in a headlock, inverted the
gravy, and by the time we got down to the 20th floor or so, I'd halted his
downward plummet. Then, of course, we rose. I angled slightly out from the
building, did a loop with the bottom of the loop level with the 85th floor,
curled up and in towards the building and let go of him just as I reached the
stall at the top of the second loop. His body lobbed through the broken
window, and fell on the sofa inside with a crash.
Cameron grabbed him and cuffed him. "You're nicked, sir" he said. I stood on
the desk and snapped off a salute. "Come off it Min." I grinned. "Well, if
you're done with me, I'm off." Cameron nodded. "Yeah, I guess we can deal with
it now. Thanks, Min." Huh! I just cracked open the biggest fraud in history,
and it's "Thanks Min." Well, I suppose that's why I took the King's Shilling.
No need to use the fire exit to get out. I'll keep that as my little secret, I
think. I can see a major benefit here; in future when I fly out of London,
I'll pop down the the Telecom Tower, find an excuse to use the lift, and I'll
be able to take off with a thousand feet altitude without any effort. But it
was even better than that,
I put on my flight suit, and the cape, for dramatic effect. And then I dived
out of the window, and curved up to land on the roof. Last time I was here,
I'd seen something rather nice, and I wanted to make sure it worked. On top of
every major skyscraper, you'll see air vents. That's because the glass walls
let in more heat than they let out, it's the greenhouse effect. You didn't
have to heat a building like this, the main problem is getting the heat out.
So they have a powerful air conditioning system, and the heat exchangers for
that are on the roof. Or, to put it anither way, there's a stonking great
air-heater on the roof, getting rid of the heat that the rest of the building
collects, by heating the open air. And, of course, hot air rises.
No-one could see me now, so I took off my cape and stowed it in my belly bag.
Then I rose a few feet into the air, and felt the updraft from the air vents.
I circled, and the hot air pulled me up and up, giving me the potential energy
I needed without having to make any effort. Round and round I glided,
widdershins, putting on altitude with each turn. The sheer size of the updraft
from this huge building was just what I'd always needed for the flight back to
Wales. Now I could use the mountains to get altitude for the flight East, and
the Telecom Tower to launch me going westbound. At angels five, I was still
getting lots of updraft, maybe I could use it some other time to see just how
high it would take me. But right now, all I wanted to do was get back to
Gingerbread, get a decent meal down me, go to bed, and dream about Harry.